No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service
Way back when you were younger, you’d been assigned to write a paper about yourself, and one of the questions that had stuck with you was ‘where do you see yourself in the future?’
You can’t remember how you’d answered the question, but you do know that ‘low-wage Taco Bell employee’ wasn’t in your imagination back then.
Nor should it have been; young kids—as you yourself once were—should have the benefit of imagination before the crushing reality of late-stage capitalism does its work. Your time on the job has taught you that if you have time to lean you have time to clean, and that nepotism and the Peter Principle are alive and well. Despite some of your managers, the store still generally functions well enough to provide speedy sacks of tacos and other Tex-Mex food to lines of customers, from breakfast to Fourthmeal.
Right now is a slack time, after the lunch rush and before the dinner rush. There are a couple of cars queued in the drive through but they aren’t your problem. Your station is the cash register and, of course, whatever other tasks can be squeezed out of you during your lulls.
Aside from the ever-seeing eyes of the cameras, nobody’s in view, so you check the time, then look out over the lobby/dining area. All is well.
A good day? The calm before the storm?
You don’t know. There’s no way of knowing; the future brings what it will. You check the time once again. A proper analog clock has a second hand to sweep along, always marking the passage of time. A digital clock only does minutes, and updates them when it does. Can it be trusted?
Can anything computerized be trusted? You zone out for a moment, and then the minute has refreshed; freedom is closer than it was before.
And then your training kicks in, as it often does. Cups need to be restocked, and you’re not selling tacos at the moment, you’re a drain on the balance sheets.
Work didn’t instill the satisfaction of unwrapping a tube of new cups, of shoving them into the spring-loaded cup holder—dozens of rounds of ammo for the soft drink gun, ready and waiting to be filled with Pepsi or Mountain Dew or Baja Blast.
Cups are only the beginning. Napkin supplies are dwindling, and then there’s sauces to consider. The self-serve station has been picked over; today there’s been a run on Fire sauce. You wouldn’t have guessed it by the customers you’d served.
And then the door swings open. You dump the last packets of sauce into their bucket and even as you mind is processing this new customer you’re switching from stocker to cashier mode, ready to push the buttons on the cash register, ready to recite—on demand—every menu item and variation thereof.
Sometimes fate throws a wrench in the works. Sometimes there’s a bus, loaded with zombie-like customers who need their Taco Bell fix.
Sometimes there’s a weirdo.
Sometimes there’s a pony.
You watch as she pushes the door open with a forehoof and steps into the lobby. She’s a lavender pegasus with a pompadour and a big gauze bandage around a foreleg.
Her attention goes first to the ordering kiosk, and then to the front counter, where you’ve just slotted yourself back into position behind the POS system.
She locks eyes on you and then the menu board behind you as she purposefully clops to the counter.
As customers go, she knows the routine. No hemming and hawing, when she steps up she knows what she wants. “I want a bean burrito and a crunchwrap supreme with no meat, please. To go.”
[CHOICE]
>pony wants a taco, sell the pony a taco (hero)
>no shirt, no shoes, no service (villain)
[CHOICE A: Hero]
You nod and push the appropriate virtual buttons on the screen. “Would you like anything else with that?”
“You don’t still have Choco Tacos, do you?”
You shake your head. Regrettably, they’re gone. Maybe, like the Mexican pizza, they’ll return one day. Maybe not.
As she’s reaching for her credit card (you’d wondered how she was going to pay), you finally make the connection. There’s been an air of familiarity ever since you’d seen her walk through the door. “You’re one of the tornado ponies, aren’t you?”
She nods. “Velvet Light.”
“I’ve seen you on YouTube. Is there—” You’d watched more than one video of them fighting tornados, both from the pegasi’s GoPro perspective, and from ground-based news crews. Occasional interviews as well; you remember she’d been interviewed before—you’d seen her name on the chyron.
She’d been wearing bandages then, too. Weather work was dangerous.
“Maybe. Human weather is uncontrolled and hard to predict, but there’s systems forming up near here that could make tornadoes.” She gestures at the bandages on her leg. “If you hear sirens or other warnings, take them seriously, there’s a front that’s likely to make severe thunderstorms and hail and maybe tornadoes.”
“Oh wow.” You can’t help but look out the window. The sky’s clear . . . but it looks like stormclouds are building on the horizon.
You turn around and grab her food, put it in a sack, and pass it across the counter. Velvet makes a brief stop at the sauce kiosk, grabbing a few sachets of fire sauce before leaving the restaurant.
You watch as she takes flight, the Taco Bell sack held in her mouth.
There’s a good chance the next time you see her is going to be on the news.
[CHOICE B: Villain]
Your manager has instilled many things into you, including the inflexibility of The Rules. Said rules are posted on the door for all to see: No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service. She’s already failed the rules.
Maybe she has shoes on and maybe she doesn’t, you’re not going to ask her to lift a hoof to check. She certainly doesn’t have a shirt—or pants, but the rules don’t speak of that.
And if that wasn’t enough, another sign prohibits animals, except for service animals. There are some who push that rule, who bring dogs that clearly aren’t trained to perform medically necessary service. Sometimes those customers get kicked out and sometimes they don’t, depending on the manager on duty.
You’re not a monster, and you do recognize that she’s one of the ponies who’s been tasked with studying and maybe stopping tornadoes—there are dozens if not hundreds of videos on YouTube starring her and the rest of her team. If Taco Bell had a celebrity exception—
And maybe it does, but that’s above your pay grade. You’re just following orders as you tell her that she can’t be in the restaurant without a shirt or shoes or proof that she’s a service animal and not some ordinary pony out of her pasture.
Her ears fall, and she turns and walks back out of the restaurant, her head down. You feel a brief twinge of remorse, but rules are rules and on the chance that your manager is watching the security cameras or happens to step out of her sanctuary in the next couple of minutes, you’d rather not be on the pointy end of her wrath. You take one last look at the retreating pony, then return to your make-work duty of stocking sachets of sauce.